


a homestuck au in which jake is a mediocre writer with a lot of big dreams and dirk is a prostitute with tuberculosis

by coldhope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Exactly What It Says on the Tin, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:11:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"you know what this ship needs?  a moulin rouge crossover."</p>
            </blockquote>





	a homestuck au in which jake is a mediocre writer with a lot of big dreams and dirk is a prostitute with tuberculosis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eggjam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggjam/gifts).



> " [12:37:50 AM] venusian_eye: can i gift this to you on ao3  
> [12:38:39 AM] eggjam: *goes into the night and does not return screaming do as thou wilst, satan* "

“You still ain’t got the money for this,” he says, half question half resigned, biting his rouged lower lip, muffled brothel noises in the rooms below.  Chair shoved up under the door handle, a tangle of sheets on the bed, the smell of sweat and sex and terror.  You came in through the window silhouetted by the waxing moon. 

His eyes are clementine-color and you hold the swanlike arch of his cheekbones under inkstained brown fingers and kiss him anyway, and he lets you, for free.  Despair lurks in the bruisy shadows under his eyes when he says he loves you but you kiss him like you can’t see it, sing him songs that you made up, stroke his skin.  Touch him like he’s yours.

You think if you’re ever going to Write it’s going to be about him.  Because Paris is for lovers and Paris is for you and he, in the soft white planes of his body that never sees sunlight and the nighttime glisten in his eyes and the way your skin sticks to his, and you don’t have the money to afford him but there’s no place for you in the world but wrapped around him, like a sinew wrapped around a bone.

He coughs low, wet and hacking, and tells you it’s the cigarettes.  Tells you he’s got enough set by to wait until you have the money to buy him off the brothel.  Promises he doesn’t sleep with anyone else.

Drunk on the madness of the love that devours you, you believe him.

 

* * *

(Sometimes you think the high flush on his cheekbones is real, but you know the stage-manager loves his whores to look bright and vivid and wild. He never seems to tire. There’s something brilliant about him that wakes an equal desperation in you.)

* * *

 

“You gotta stop coming to see me,” he says and he won’t look at you.

Why, you ask.  Why, tell me what’s wrong, what happened, you said you’d be ready.  I have the tickets for the Island and you and I will live in sunlight and I will feed you clementines and we will never be afraid of men with money and guns and dogs again. 

His voice is very thick.  He’s in all black today, gloves on.  His face is gray like cigarette ash or overcast skies,.  “You - you gotta stop coming to see me, it’s over.”

Orange-eyes, what is the matter? I don’t understand, you think you say, you are not sure, because the world is splintering at the edges.

“It was nice,” he says.  His body is like a statue.

You love me, you say.  I don’t understand, you love me.

“Please don’t make this difficult,” he says, all smiles, expression hard as the diamonds on his choker, the jewels the prince’s cousin gave him, and you suspect everything, you feel a knife twisting in your guts that rips you to shreds.  “It is my occupation to make men believe I love them.”

Within your heart there is only one long, scraping howl of torment, but you cannot produce sound.  Something inside you is broken.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and pulls away from your trembling hands to leave you, alone by the the gutters.

He takes the world with him.

 

* * *

 

You lose time. You wander, and the city opens its dark heart to you and somewhere you are drinking someone else’s absinthe, watching the clear green louche to pearly opacity, smelling the high thin reek of burnt sugar, feeling reality come unmoored behind your eyes. Then you’re somewhere else entirely, and it’s thin vinegary wine, the kind of shit the students drank before they drummed up an attempt at émeute in the eighteen-twenties. It makes you ill: you don’t care. You don’t care about anything. You are lost. You have always been lost.

Somehow you find yourself back at your lodgings as the birds begin to sing in the city’s palace-parks, and you wonder, staring at your typewriter, why you bothered to come home.

 

* * *

 

Have you heard he’s dying, she hiccups at you.  That pretty young thing with the sweet tenor at the Red Glasses, the one you used to rave over.  And it’s a damn shame for them, only how are they going to replace a voice like that with a face so pretty?  Not quick, for sure, and a steep loss for them, too, I heard the Marquis took a liking to the songbird, and they won’t be getting another penny out of him.  Poor thing.  Are you all right?  You look poorly yourself - hey, pay for your goddamned tab before you take off - fucking  _anglais_   -

You hit the doors until your palms are bloody with splinters, like a madman, until they have to let you in or have you arrested again.

He is pale like candlewax, thin and fragile against the linen sickbed and his eyes are orange glass and when he sees you, oh, when he sees you, he blinks through a haze of morphine and fever, sweat-slick brow, blood-stench air.  The doctor leaves when you begin to sob, kneeling on the dirty floor.

“I will love you,” he says, “until time dies.”  Soft and tired.

“Come away with me,” you say, “come away with me, we will go to the sanatoriums, to the baths, I’ll take you to Spain, to Italy, we can run away together -“

He is crying.  The tears roll down his face like stars falling by lamplight.  “You ain’t got the money,” he laughs, and brings your hand to his burning lips and presses kisses to your knuckles.  “Love -“

And then the wet hard coughs return and you hold him, hold him as if that could change the universe, as if your touch and your love, however glorious, could do anything at all.

They pull you away from the body in the morning.

 

* * *

 

And because narrative causality is not stronger than M. tuberculosis, nor is love, months after that fearful night you find yourself restless, feverish, with the beginnings of a little dry cough that will come and go but never again quite leave you, until it has had its way. Perhaps you find this fitting. Perhaps you find it just. 

You would not take it back for anything under the sun, or beyond it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. we forgot to put in leeches. how could we forget to put in leeches? maybe next time
> 
> 2\. before anyone gets in a huge snit I'm glampersand on tumblr and coldhope = ceruleancynic
> 
> 3\. will someone photoshop their sprite heads onto a moulin rogue screencap if i curtsy pretty enough????

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Scarlet Midnight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/736501) by [theHeatCreator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theHeatCreator/pseuds/theHeatCreator)




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